Save Money, Don’t Use Your Utilities
This building project demonstrates some creative thinking by eliminating the use of traditional energy and the energy consumed by municipal utilities to treat wastewater. Zero impact living may not be acheivable but this project comes close. Read how your next project can be built for less, operate for less and reduce the stress on the environment.
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There’s gold in this green housing complex
Don Martin
CanWest News Service
Saturday, October 07, 2006
VICTORIA - For a 71-year-old retired nurse who relishes backpacking and kayaking, and wants her home filled with stairs to climb for exercise, it was love at first sight even though she could only see the blueprints.
The object of Willie Waddell’s affection, which will see her happily abandon an idyllic 25-year lifestyle on B.C.’s Saltspring Island next year, is a massive integrated housing, office and retail complex so environmentally advanced it could actually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions — a first in North America.
A building that’s good for the environment? It can be done, say the developers of Dockside Green, whose 1.2-million-square-foot complex is rising on the shores of Victoria harbour.
You can be accused of shamelessly praising Dockside Green, which is after all a developer’s $300-million bid to make an obscene profit on prime real estate. Or accept that this project is the showplace of a much greener future in building design.
Imagine a townhouse-condo complex severed from the city sewage system, cut off from the natural gas line and loaded with every imaginable energy saving, water reusing or recycling gizmo on the market. That’s Dockside Green.
Sewage will be treated on site and used for irrigation and toilet flushing, with the surplus water diverted into gurgling waterways or marketed for industrial use and the sludge sold for fertilizer. Power for heating and hot water will be generated through the gasification of scrap wood; the excess electricity will be sold.
The roof is a garden fed by rainwater. The outdoor lighting is solar. The appliances and washing utilities are all made-in-Canada low-energy or low-flow. The temperature and indoor lighting can be set over the Internet to conserve energy. The wood flooring comes from a demolished air hanger or from trees resurrected from old forests flooded in the past for hydro reservoirs. The carpets will be recycled every 10 years or so. There will be bikes for the trails bisecting the site and electric cars for residents to use in lieu of gas-powered vehicles.
Waddell was so enraptured by the first phase of housing that she paid more than $600,000 for a three-storey townhouse and persuaded her son to buy the penthouse.
“I’m embarrassed to say I drive an SUV now, but I can’t wait to get rid of it. Here on Saltspring Island it’s hilly and we can get snow and there’s no transit, so you almost need it,” she confesses, before adding she uses a wood stove and is religious about turning off the lights.
“Dockside sparked something in me and I hope it will become a model and an environmental philosophy for others.”
She’s not the only one. Community activists have fallen all over themselves to praise it, and the final design received a standing ovation at city council last year.
Windmill Development Group spokesman Joe Van Belleghem is an environmental capitalist who came out of retirement to supervise the greening of its blueprints. He makes an odd observation: “As we made it environmentally better and socially better, an interesting thing happened. The economics got better.”
This project, he suggests, reflects the age of environmental economy, where being green and profitable are no longer at odds. “Not long ago you didn’t want to say you were doing something good for the environment because people thought you were a lousy businessman. Now … the guys who are responsible to the environment are making more money.”
The Dockside Green project saves almost 300,000 cubic metres (78 million gallons) of water — or about 60 per cent of normal demand on the water system — which nets homeowners a $200,000 savings on their water bill.
By negotiating an $80,000 tax break from the city for not linking with the sewage treatment and by capturing heat from the treatment plant and unused sewer lines, the cost of the internal water-treatment system was recouped.
If the proposed power plant is supported by BC Hydro, a project that already gobbles less than half the electricity and gas of a normal development this size will save so much more that it will actually eliminate its environmental footprint as a climate change culprit.
When the first phase went on the market even before a shovel went in the ground, it sold out in a day. For environmental entrepreneurs, it proves the bottom line can be a lucrative shade of green.